Ask us: What are you hobbies? Why can you never commit to plans? Want to eat out on Thursday?

Welcome to "Ask us" -- a series of posts designed to answer some of our most frequently asked questions. It took over an hour to get to the nearest dairy farm from the house I grew up in. While the local nursery had a few goats and the occasionally pig, animal agricultural was very distant from where I grew up. My life has changed significantly in the last decade and I now boast skills like being able to milk a cow, drive a tractor, and bottle feed a calf. When I go home to visit, I get asked some really interesting questions. I thought I would take a crack at answering some of those questions here

What are your hobbies? Why can you never commit to plans? Want to eat out on Thursday?

This series of questions is usually met by rueful laughter on my part. Once upon a time I had hobbies and a predictable schedule, but these days the farm comes first (second, third…seventeenth).

What are my hobbies? Well, I love rowing, knitting, and reading. In the past 3 years I have been in a boat once, finished one non-agriculture related book, and knit about 2/3 of a scarf.

Why can’t we commit to plans? Because sometimes the cows go into labor or get out and sometimes the compressor goes bad and needs emergency repair or the semen salesman stops by or our main waterline to the farm bursts. Nothing on a farm seems to happen on schedule and even when everything is going according to plan, things change at the last minute. We are so grateful to have friends and family that understand and are willing to accommodate our ridiculous schedule and last minute cancellations.

Some of our more interesting excuses include: “We are running about 15 minutes late for Seder because we are having trouble convincing Cordova to walk up the stairs” “I’m going to be late for work because the milk truck blocked me into the driveway” “Butterfly is cold, so we brought her into the house to warm up. Would you mind coming over for dinner instead of going out? We don’t want to give the calf free reign of the kitchen” and “We are running about 20 minutes late because the semen salesman stopped by”. Since I hate how ridiculous all of our excuses sound, we end up skipping on hobbies and dinner plans a lot. It isn’t that we don’t want to go out to dinner, sing in a chorus, join a rowing team, or read a book, it is that our animals come first.